Tag Archives: Off-Broadway

Danger and Revolution: Ike Holter’s Exit Strategy

W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote, “For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.” That statement could serve as the epigraph of Ike Holter’s startling new drama Exit Strategy currently in previews at The Cherry Lane Theatre (co-produced by Primary Stages and the Philadelphia Theatre Company). This new work dramatizes the crisis in American education with a voice of anger tempered with compassion.


Holter is working in a similar vein to David Simon (The Wire, Treme, Show Me a Hero) in exploring the gritty reality of local politics and local corruption. The focus here is on one school on the Southside of Chicago that faces closure at the end of the school year because it is falling apart, because it has disastrous test scores, because the land is worth more than the building. At first, the faculty is bitter and resentful but ultimately passive. It takes the audacious act of a student to force them into action and to take the fight to City Hall. The resulting protest resounds with the power of the forgotten and marginalized to make those in power to take notice. Alas, like Simon, Holter eschews pollanyish endings.

Exit Strategy critiques the current socio-political state on a number of levels. First, and most obviously, there is the dissection of the indifference of City Hall to the needs of its constituents, at least its constituents who are not white or not wealthy. Second, the play serves as an expose of the current crisis in American education. There are excellent schools, just as there are excellent doctors. But if you don’t have the coin to pay for them, you are never going to receive their benefits; we can see the slow construction of a society stratified by class with the boundaries drawn by access to education. Third and finally, though, it is an attack on the indifference and apathy that seemingly infects every corner of the nation. Teachers and administrators go through the motions even though those motions are costing people their jobs, their dignity, their future.

All of which makes Exit Strategy sound didactic, which it is not. The script crackles and moves with a fleetness of foot and dark humor of individuals facing impossible odds. Essentially Holter has done what the 1980’s film Teachers was supposed to do: offer audiences a raw agitprop investigation of urban education. In this, the playwright is ably assisted by director Kip Fagan and some of the tightest ensemble acting I have seen on the New York stage in years.

Deirdre Madigan commands attention  in the play’s opening scene as a teacher whose raw hostility masks a far more generous heart. Brandon J. Pierce is brings the right mixture of cockiness, anger, and immaturity to Donnie, the student who inspires the small revolution to life. Michael Cullen, Aimé Donna Kelly, Rey Lucas, and Christina Nieves occupy the spectrum of apathy and disgust that is any faculty lounge. The lynchpin is Ryan Spahn whose Ricky is the assistant principal; the various odious tasks that come down from City Hall often fall upon his shoulders.  Ricky is a complicated character: an essentially nice guy with a good heart who feels that he has no choice to be the hatchet man until the scales fall from his eyes. His transformation from spineless bureaucrat to the leader of the protest is nuanced and organic. We witness a man find his own sense of moral worth. Kudos too to Holter for his decision that in making Ricky gay his sexuality became just one facet of his character not the overall defining feature of his character.

If I have one complaint about Exit Strategy it is this: it is too short. Usually it is the opposite problem, but Holter has built so much — and there journey here is long and complicated with a number of set-backs — that he needs to allow it to breathe more. Further, his characters have such interesting full lives that we want to spend more time with them. For instance, Ricky’s relationship with Rey Lucas’s Luce is rarely touched, but when it does, seems to be one of missed opportunities and two good people failing to connect and communicate with one another. Like so much else, I wish they had given more exploration. But if you left your audience wanting more,  I suppose that could be classified as a good problem.

Holter’s play is ultimately a tragedy of America. Again, to quote Du Bois, “Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” In Exit Strategy, ignorance alas wins, but it does get a fight.

[Note: This performance this writer saw as a preview performance.]

Not Even Chlorine Can Clean Away This Corruption

Lucas Hnath has written the best play David Mamet didn’t. That assessment may initially appear to be damning with faint praise. Yet, Hnath has exceeded the reach of his predecessor in several key elements.

Currently coming to the end of it’s run at New York Theatre Workshop, Hnath’s Red Speedo details the late career hopes of professional swimmer Ray (played with off-kilter intensity by Alex Breaux). The plot revolves around whether or not he took performance-enhancing drugs to aid him for his Olympic trials. The moral quagmire encompasses Ray, his brother/manager Peter (Lucas Caleb Rooney), his coach (Peter Jay Fernandez), and ex-girlfriend Lydia (Zoë Walters). Hnath shares Mamet’s ability to bring his drama alive with staccato lines spat out like frantic machine-gun fire from Apocalypse Now. He also dramatizes the moral rot that can pervade an institution and how the appearance of propriety often becomes more important than actual propriety.

Hnath excels in some compelling ways. First, in Lydia, Hnath has created a fully realized female character. Lydia is not an idea or caricature or plot device. As embodied by Walters, Lydia — even though she appears in a single scene — is fully a part of the tapestry of the world. Her reach — the effect that she has on the narrative outcome — far greater than her stage time might at first indicate. Morally damaged like the other characters, Zoë is the one who tries to find a path — stumbling in the dark as she does — to something more ethical, something that allows her to leave her past behind.

Second, the playwright carefully weaves the personal and the professional together. Choices flow organically from character, from damaged pasts, from desperation. If a character chooses a morally questionable path, the drive emanates as much from the pains of failures, the fear of abandonment and loss, and the desire to escape errors. Greed is not so much a motive as fear. That makes them more understandable, more relatable. We can bring them closer to us, rather than judging them from the distance. Of course, once we have brought Ray into our hearts — when we think he is a jerky, somewhat stupid, somewhat deluded guy — then Hnath brings down the hammer and we are confronted by the monstrosity of Ray’s actions.

And that, finally, leads to Hnath’s greatest playwriting strength: the ability to surprise. None of the salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross are particularly likable. We see them for what they are from the start. And when they fall upon one another in the second act, it is entertaining to be sure, but the audience is kept at a distance from them; we can happily feel morally superior to them because we are removed from them. Not so with Ray. Hnath sets his drama so that we believe Peter to be the fast-talking lawyer with the ethics of a deranged squirrel while Ray has just been along for the ride but is ultimately a sweet kid, redeemable. As the play unfolds, we see different shades of both that reveal complexity and nuance to both. The playwright carefully reveals details that leave us, at the end, with the judgment of Ray that is starkly different, starkly darker than where we started.

Director Lileanna Blain-Cruz stages the drama brilliantly, and the transformation of the New York Theatre Workshop space into the side of a swimming pool serves the work admirably. Fernandez excels as the Coach, and he lays bare the contradictions of his character as he must navigate the shoals of which moral compromises to make and which to avoid.

With Prodigal Son, Shanley is Our James Joyce

There comes a moment in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus, the author’s alter ego states, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The novel chronicles how a young man creates himself both as an individual and as an artist. As he authors himself, he walks through the fires large — nationalism, religion — and small — the struggles of adolescence, a dysfunctional family. Last  month when I saw Prodigal Son, I came to the conclusion as the lights came up for the curtain call that, at last in John Patrick Shanley, we had our American Joyce.

Much can and has been said about Prodigal Son, but I want to here focus on that Joyce connection. Shanley, as with Joyce, has brought his adolescent self to life through words — through poetry and prose, through philosophy and theology — to be reconsidered, reexamined, to undergo catharsis as much for the audience as no doubt himself. His avatar, Jim, is truly a remarkable creation. And I should add that in Timothée Chalamet (famous for Homeland and Interstellar) Shanley has found the ideal collaborator. Actor and author do not shy away from Jim’s darkness — he says and does the stupid things teenagers often do as they wrestle with the twin tensions of childhood and adulthood — his brilliant narcissism, or his self-destructive impulses. He is not likable the way teenagers on television sit-coms are often likable. But he is engaging and endearing. His darkness is understandable, his pain a source of empathy, his yearning to connect with an world of ideas that he cannot yet quite touch remarkable. The play is no better than when Shanley lets Chalamet tear into a monologue, trip the light fantastic in a way that has the raw magic of stream-of-consciousness to find truths (human truths, perhaps, if not universal truths) in the most Joycean, or given the play’s setting in the 1960’s, Kerouacian way. The actor opens up to show us both the wonder and pain within.

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Stanley is at his most powerful when his flawed characters wrestle with faith and doubt (in reference to his perhaps most famous work). What intrigues here for Jim is the same that intrigues for Stephen: the temptation for sin he finds within and not from without. He recognizes the darkness in himself — the darkness that dwells within all of us — but he is intelligent enough (brave enough? foolish enough?) to address it and not ignore it as most do. What will win inside him? Will what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” eventually hold sway? Jim does not know. He wants to find the answer, though perhaps it too scares him.

Louise, the headmaster’s wife, tells him, “I think James Quinn is a fine outline, and it’s up to you to fill it in.” Shanley, I think bravely, undertakes the return to his tumultuous past (for the nation, for himself) to try and unlock the puzzle of his earlier life. Kudos to him for not giving us pat answers — for still not truly knowing what the answers are yet, though he surely has a better grasp of the questions.

Shanley, for me, became the American Joyce the day he decided to put Prodigal Son on stage. Here is the kicker. I do not believe he set out to do that. If he had, his work would have been derivative, pretentious, blah. He just sat out to write the most searingly honest play he could. In so doing, he stumbled onto something unintended and rare: a work uniquely specific and uniquely universal. Joyce writes of Stephen, “He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.” Shapely could write the same of Jim.

Fugard’s New Play is Canonical

I had the opportunity this past weekend to see Athol Fugard’s new play The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek at the Signature Theater in New York. Fugard has added a nuanced and multi-layered work to his canon. The fact that he is closing in on 83 and still able to grow as a playwright speaks to the power of his voice and to the great well of the stories he still needs to tell.

The play is set in two time periods: 1981 (apartheid era) and 2003 (post-apartheid era). The beginning is deceptively simple. Nukhain (Leon Addison Brown), a worker on a ranch in Mpumalanga Province, spends what little free time he has from his labors to paint rocks (what he refers to as his “flowers”) on the side of a desolate hill. Not many people see them, but this project provides an outlet for his artistic self. But this day is unlike the rest. He faces a giant boulder, the last rock to be painted on the hill. Instead of turning it into a massive flower, he uses it instead as a canvas to tell his own story, to provide his own history. At the same time, he has taken a young worker Bokkie (Caleb McLaughlin) a young worker under his wing. What he has painted frightens and excites both of them. It is unlike anything that he has ever done. However, the mistress of the farm Elmarie (Bianca Amato) shows up and is at first puzzled and then disturbed by this new work. She wants Nukhain to remove it and go back to painting one of his flowers. Bokkie objects, but Nukhain agrees.

The second act jumps ahead over 20 years. Bokkie has now grown up and is a teacher, Jonathan (Sahr Ngaujah). His mission is to restore Nukhain’s painting. After a tug-of-war with Elmarie, he at last has permission to do so.

The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek is a wrenching work. Fugard proves again that he is a master of the genre in that he essentially sneaks up behind the audience at about the 40-minute mark in Act One and hits it in back of the head with a two-by-four (metaphorically speaking). Fugard conveys the complexities of a nation torn apart by years of strife and racial animosity. His great gift of weaving tales of the downtrodden with lyricism and empathy is, of course, present. Here, though, he examines culture, and the threat that black culture posed to the apartheid regime.

So long as Nukhain painted flowers on rocks, it was fine. Beautiful, yes, but with no significance whatsoever. Once, though, he tries to tell his story – which is not particularly political, but because this is South Africa is de facto political – then his work becomes dangerous and must be destroyed. Though physical violence is implied throughout, none is perpetuated on stage. And yet, Elmarie’s determination to remove the painting (which, by the way, appears as an extraordinary piece of African Art) is the greatest violence of them all.

 

That Fugard is able to convey all the horrors of the apartheid regime in this one understated moment speaks volumes about his talents as an artist. And let us not be mistaken. Though the actions of the play are specific to South Africa, the work speaks as much to any nation where a ruling class seeks to erase the culture of a disenfranchised group. It is a play that needs to be seen, should be seen – it also needs to be a play that is forever cemented in the canon.

All You Need is a Man with a Rhyme

Last night, I had the good fortune of seeing A Sucker Emcee at the Labyrinth Theatre.  Craig muMs Grant — rap artist, poet, playwright, actor (Oz) — performs a rap/poetry/dramatic monologue. Rich Medina provides key support as a DJ; though silent throughout, he creates conversation with muMs and serves as chorus to the play. A Sucker Emcee is at once very new and very old. And it is because it very much dwells in this paradox that it is an extremely powerful, honest, and wrenching evening of theatre.

I consciously used the term “chorus” above because muMs and his director Jenny Koons craft something very elemental here. Before Thespis stepped before an audience as something other than himself, theatre was a poet and a musician weaving a tale on stage. The music is hip-hop; the theatricality is elemental, primal, old when the Dionysia. If you don’t think that such an old form has relevance to the modern theatrical sensibility, go to Labyrinth and be amazed.

muMs tells the story of his life, his artistic life, how he came to be a poet, a rapper, an emcee. It is a life of triumphs and tragedies, mistakes comic and painful, good times turned bad and bad times turned good — because it is a life. The poet came of age in the Bronx in the late 70’s and 80’s. He touches on how his youth intersected with the birth of hip-hop. In so doing, he fits very much into that vein of American poetry that finds its home at that intersection of the personal and the political, the historic sweep of a nation or community and the closely observed moment of the individual. Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and James Baldwin would welcome muMs into their clubhouse with open arms.

It is the great paradox — its magic, its genius, its madness — that the more specific a work is, the more universal it is. James Joyce’s Ulysses testifies to that wonder. When you sit in the dark and are caught in the rhythm and rhyme of the performance, you cannot help but be carried away to a place of emotional truth caught floating on the rushing current of the elegance and rawness of his verse. muMs’ family is not your family, muMs’ struggles are not your struggles — and yet you recognize your family, your struggles in the frenzy of his poetry. It is a supremely human moment that only theatre can provide. What hits home is the extreme humanity of this gifted compassionate man who wrestled with his fears and became the artist of authenticity that he wanted to be.

Go. Be amazed.

 

The Empire Strikes Back

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at The Public Theater (co-produced by GableStage and the RSC in collaboration with OSU). I have a great fondness for the Bard’s Roman plays, and this one is no exception — though it does not get performed much. I am happy to report that this production is as vital, passionate, and relevant a presentation of the work as one is likely to get. And having sat through a few museum performances of what is supposed to be an emotionally-charged narrative, I am glad to see Antony and Cleopatra brought back to life.

Firstly, this is a funny interpretation. The humor is by no means gratuitous. It comes out of the situation that these exceedingly brilliant but exceedingly flawed people are very much in love but also not exactly compatible either.  The director, Tarrell Alvin McCraney, manages to evoke empathy for both Cleopatra and Antony when the other is behaving unreasonably (this happens often). Additionally, McCraney finds the Monty Python-like absurdity in the situation, such as when Antony, who has tried to commit suicide and failed for the death of Cleopatra, discovers that she is in fact not dead. Rather than blunt the emotional impact, this choice instead heightens it. On the stage of the Public, they are so wonderfully, messily, completely human that it was a joy to be with them. Much more enthralling than being in the room with two beings who behave as if they are gods.

Secondly, the production embraces a post-colonial theme. The Tempest remains the go-to work in the canon for collisions of culture, but there is more than enough textual evidence in Antony and Cleopatra to support a similar reading here. The setting has been moved to the late 18th century. Rome is represented by the England of this period, at the genesis of its worldwide expansion. Egypt is represented as a Caribbean island. McRaney utilizes both Caribbean and African music, dance, and ritual in the telling of his story.  Santería plays a prominent role. Caesar, who is meant to be an exemplary figure, morphs into something less heroic when costumed as a Regency Era Sea Lord.

Thirdly, the small acting company performs the Herculean task of conveying  the epic sweep of the work. Jonathan Cake (Antony) and Joaquina Kalukango (Cleopatra) turn in nuance performances of two people who are addicted to one another and yet clearly do not belong together. Of particular note are Chivas Michael (as the Soothsayer and Eros) and Chukwudi Iwuji (as Enobarbus). The edits here placed Enobarbus as narrator and made him much more central to the runaway storyline. Iwuji becomes the voice of Antony and Cleopatra, and it is through his eyes that we witness the tragedy unfold. So his loss is as great as that of the two leads.

Productions of Shakespeare walk a very fine line. If they are too traditional, they risk becoming the theatrical  equivalent  of Miss Havisham, doomed to wander alone in a rotting house overrun by dust and cobwebs neither touching nor being touched. If they try to be too modern for the kids — hey, let’s set Taming of a Shrew on the Space Station Mir — they run the risk of becoming parodies of themselves and losing all relevance. This Antony and Cleopatra gets the balance just right. Special kudos to dramaturg James Shapiro (full disclosure: he was my mentor back during my Columbia days) for helping ground the emotional life and the world of the play.

I highly recommend this production. It fulfills the prescription for art of another Roman, Horace; it both educates and entertains.

The Mound Builders and the Conquest of the Nice

I’ll admit it right off; other than Fifth of July, I am not that familiar with Lanford Wilson’s work. That’s right – shame on me. A couple of weeks ago I went to see The Mound Builders at The Pershing Square Signature Center. As a dramatic literature scholar, I have come to find the Signature invaluable to my research. But the company is also a terrific resource for those who have a deep love for the American stage. Signature explores the richness of the canon beyond the tired trinity of Miller, Williams, and O’Neill. (Nothing wrong with any of these writers, but too often productions of their plays have become, in the words of Brooks, deadly).

And in that regard, The Mound Builders is a very important play. In terms of style, it has a loose disjointed feel — particularly in the first act — that was endemic of its era (mid-1970’s). 21st century attention spans might find the pacing a bit off-putting, which is shame because there is a great deal lurking beneath the bellbottoms and headbands.

Wilson’s piece follows a group of archaeologists who travel to the southern tip of Illinois every summer to investigate the mounds left by pre-Columbian peoples. This particular summer, they are racing time as the local lake has been damned up and the water is rising, threatening to engulf the site of the dig. An important find sets off the tragic events at the end of the play. The characters consist mostly of the researchers and members of their immediate families. The only exception is Chad Jasker (a wonderfully conflicted Will Rogers), whose family owns the land the scientists use as a staging ground.  Familial dysfunction informs most of the relations. Couples are married just because.

The Mound Builders though is a searing indictment of a cultural imperialism (though within the confines of these shores) in a number of different forms. We realize how fleeting our time on this continent has been, and yet how much destruction we have wrought. Further, the archaeologists are so concerned with their find that the needs of the people living in the community barely register. They condescend and manipulate Jasker (a touch of the red state/blue state divide that would come later). They change state laws without consulting anyone. They will take their discoveries far away from the community for their own purposes.

The character who is on point in this deception is Dr. Dan Loggins. Zachary Booth’s take on the character is particularly riveting. His Dan is a nice, happy-go-lucky, come-what-may kind of guy – on the surface. Booth’s Dan very much reminds me of Pyle from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American; the awe-shucks attitude masks a resourceful cunning. Like Pyle, Dan is trying to get what he wants out of the local population and is quite relentless in his approach. He will provoke Jasker’s sexual confusion, look the other way when the latter is trying to seduce his wife, and push him in the direction he needs him. Nice does not mean kind, and Dan is a very rare sort of villain – one who believes that he is doing nothing but good and yet causes nothing but harm.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the wonderful turn of Danielle Skraastad as D.K. I had seen this marvelous actress in Tony Kushner’s iHomo. She had a small part in that earlier play but was mesmerizing as a pregnant theology doctoral student. Here, as D.K., she embodies the ennui and disillusionment of the time. She falls somewhere between Dorothy Parker and Mrs. Robinson.

I have seen three plays in as many months at The Signature — August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad, and finally The Mound Builders – and it has quickly become one of my primary go-to theaters. Their mission and dedication to playwright makes this company essential, and their moderate pricing makes their productions affordable. Check them out.

Neva: Must See Theatre at The Public

The following is a review I wrote on Neva, a new play currently in production for the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theatre. The review appeared in nytheatre.com (Welcome to nytheatre.com)

The American stage needs more plays like Neva.

Written and directed by Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón and translated by Andrea Thome, the production is a part of the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theatre. Calderón sets his play in St. Petersburg, Russia on January 2, 1905. This infamous date is significant because striking workers, protesting peacefully, were gunned down by Tsarist troops; that day, known as Bloody Sunday, would become the impetus for violent revolution a decade later. Meanwhile, Olga Knipper (a fantastic Bianca Amato), Anton Chekhov’s widow, rehearses for a production of The Cherry Orchard in an empty theater. She is joined by two members of the acting company: Masha (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) and Aleko (Luke Robertson). Together they muse and argue about art and revolution and the intersections thereof.

Neva stands as an excellent example of a Modernist text fully realized as both an intellectually intense and emotionally exciting night at the theatre. Calderon incorporates a number of different elements in order to breathe life into his work while nonetheless creating something new and true to his own vision. Most important of these elements is the one pertaining to Chekhov that incorporates the playwright’s artistry and biography; it revolves around The Cherry Orchard. In Chekhov’s last play, we know that change is coming to and for Russia. But what shape will that change take? Will it be that of the coarse and low-born merchant Lopakhin, or that of the idealistic and reform-minded student Trofimov? Chekhov did not know the answer –the play premiered a year before Bloody Sunday and Chekhov died during the summer in between – though he does tip the scales in favor of Lopakhin. Had he lived to see Bloody Summer, his estimation might have – nay, would have – been different. Calderón sets his play crucially when one such road to the future would be closed (or at least put on hold for several decades). Suddenly, we are in a world that Chekhov would no longer recognize, and yet his presence still dominates the lives of these characters, especially Olga’s.

As director, Calderón confines the action to a very tight space – a small dais, little more than an island awash in the darkness of the Anspacher – and provides only a single practical for lighting. He utilizes a blending of styles including Chekhovian, Brechtian, and Absurdist.

The effect of such a construction is to raise the stakes appreciably for the audience. Yes, the work is historical but not the sort of history where we are privileged with a point of “objective” observation. Rather, the history here more closely fits the German notion of Geschichte wherein political forces are in continual process from past to present in order to give form to the future. It is that conversation between past and present with which Calderón engages his audience. Neva is as much about the playwright’s native Chile – and the shadow that the Pinochet regime still casts – and the contemporary United States (a society currently in a state of transition) as it is about Russia of a century ago. True to the Modernist paradigm, he reimagines forms and ideas from the past to speak urgently of the now.

Here, Calderón follows in the tradition of two of his nation’s foremost authors. First, like Pablo Neruda, he investigates the moment where love (and a gentle eroticism) elides with the revolutionary spirit. Unlike Neruda, whose style was often one of elegiac romanticism, Calderón’s voice is a raw, primal, visceral howl. (NB: Neruda and Calderón bookend the Pinochet regime as the former died suspiciously of heart failure three days after the start of the military coup.) Second, like Vicente Huidobro, he is on a quest for authenticity in writing (here playwriting instead of poetry). But unlike Huidobro, he finds history not a burden but a source of freedom. Added to this mix is a post-colonial rejection of hegemonic cultural dominance, represented by Olga’s belief in the superiority of the German over all else.

These components make for compelling theatre indeed. Calderón anchors his play, beginning and end, with two monologues that demonstrate his virtuosity as an artist. The first, Olga’s, appears on the surface to be an egotistical actor’s rant, but beneath lurks the contradictions and paradoxes of the life in the theatre. The last, Masha’s, also exposes the many conflicting factors that contribute to a revolutionary’s state-of-mind, and Bernstine mines the role of Masha for her glorious complications and nuances. The third member of the cast, Robertson, fully embodies the role of Aleko, who must, at Olga’s bidding, constantly reenact Chekhov’s death in a mockery of a realist theatre’s catharsis. Most poignant is the scene where Chekov does not die and witnesses Lenin’s return at Finland Station and the launch of Sputnik. Aleko, the aristocrat turned actor, serves as a bridge between Olga and Masha as his politics are closer to Tolstoy’s than Trotsky’s.

I cannot say enough about this excellent, exciting, and necessary play. I am not familiar with Calderón’s other works, but now I want to be.